BY SETH ACKERMAN
NEW YORK — By the time the war against Iraq began, much of the media had been conditioned to believe, almost as an article of faith, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was bulging with chemical and biological weapons, despite years of United Nations inspections.
Reporters dispensed with the formality of applying modifiers like "alleged" or "suspected" to Iraq's supposed unconventional weapon stocks. Instead, they asked "what precise threat Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction pose to America" (NBC Nightly News, January 27). They wrote matter-of-factly of Washington's plans for a confrontation "over Iraq's banned weapons programs" (Washington Post, January 27). And they referred to debates over whether Saddam Hussein was "making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" (Time, February 3).
All of this came despite repeated reminders from the chief UN weapons inspector that it was his job to determine if Iraq was hiding weapons, and that it should not simply be assumed that Iraq was doing so.
So with much of southern Iraq in the hands of coalition forces by the weekend after the opening of hostilities, reporters naturally started asking where the weapons were: "Bush administration officials were peppered yesterday with questions about why allied forces in Iraq have not found any of the chemical or biological weapons that were President Bush's central justification for forcibly disarming Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government", the March 23 Washington Post reported.
Miraculously, the answer seemed to come that night, when military officials told the media of a "chemical facility" found in the southern town of Najaf. "Bob, as you know, there's a lot of talk right now about a chemical cache that has been found at a chemical facility", MSNBC anchor Forrest Sawyer told White House correspondent Bob Kur. "I underscore, we do not know what the chemicals are, but it sure has gotten spread around fast."
It sure had. Over on Fox News Channel, the headline banners were already rolling: "Huge chemical weapons factory found in south Iraq.... Reports: 30 Iraqis surrender at chemical weapons plant.... Coalition troops holding Iraqi in charge of chemical weapons."
The Jerusalem Post, whose embedded reporter helped break the story along with a Fox correspondent, announced in a front-page headline the next day, "US troops capture first chemical plant".
The same day, a Fox correspondent in Qatar quietly issued an update to the story, "The chemical weapons facility discovered by coalition forces did not appear to be an active chemical weapons facility". Further testing was required. In fact, US officials had admitted that morning that the site contained no chemicals at all and had been abandoned long ago.
So went the weapons hunt. On numerous occasions, the discovery of a stash of illegal Iraqi arms was loudly announced — often accompanied by an orgy of triumphalist off-the-cuff punditry — only to be deflated inconspicuously, and in a lower tone of voice, until the next false alarm was sounded.
Gave up the ghost
But by the beginning of May, the Bush administration gave up the ghost — apparently deciding that the day-by-day coverage of the weapons search, a slow drip of constant negative findings, was eroding the credibility of its prewar claims. In a series of interviews and off-the-record conversations, officials tried to talk down expectations, letting it be known that they now predicted no weapons would be found at all.
An anonymous leak from a "senior Bush administration official" yielded a front-page article in the May 2 London Financial Times: "The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he would be 'amazed if we found weapons-grade plutonium or uranium' and it was unlikely large volumes of biological or chemical material would be discovered."
So how had the media come to be so convinced of the weapons' existence? And could they have seen past the White House spin had they chosen to?
In part, journalists absorbed their aura of certainty from a battery of "independent" weapons experts who repeated the mantra of Iraq's concealment of banned weapons over and over. Journalists used these "experts" as outside sources who could independently evaluate the administration's claims. Yet often these "experts" were simply repeating what they heard from US officials, forming an endless loop of self-reinforcing scare mongering.
Some "experts" had a political axe to grind. Charles Duelfer, a former UN weapons inspector, had been a State Department functionary for years before joining the UNSCOM inspection team. At the UN Security Council, critics of US policy viewed him with suspicion as a Trojan horse. Once his UN tour of duty was over, he became a "resident scholar" at the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, appearing on TV news shows as an impartial authority. He answered technical questions on subjects like liquid bulk anthrax and aerial satellite photos, offering his considered judgment that Iraq unquestionably was hiding a huge arsenal.
But off-camera, Duelfer admitted he was a committed proponent of regime change whether Husseon was harbouring illegal weapons or not (Endgame, Scott Ritter): "I think it would be a mistake to focus on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. To do so ignores the larger issue of whether or not we want this dictator to have control over a nation capable of producing 6 billion barrels of oil per day... If you focus on the weapons issue, the first thing you know, Iraq will be given a clean bill of health."
'Inactionable intelligence'
The US and British governments were proactive in managing the media on the weapons issue. Beginning in the autumn of 1997, the British intelligence agency MI6 ran a disinformation campaign to promote the idea that Iraq was still hiding banned arms, according to sources cited by Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, March 31).
MI6 secretly arranged for an unidentified UNSCOM official sympathetic to Anglo-American policy to funnel false or unverifiable information — so-called inactionable intelligence — to the spy agency, which then planted the stories in newspapers in Britain and abroad.
An unnamed former official in US President Bill Clinton's administration said the US approved the operation. "I knew that was going on", he told Hersh. "We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare."
Within the press, perhaps the most energetic disseminator of "inactionable intelligence" on Iraq's putative weapons has been the New York Times' Judith Miller. A veteran of the Iraqi WMD beat, Miller has accumulated a bulging clippings file over the years full of splashy, yet often maddeningly unverifiable, exposes alleging various Iraqi arms shenanigans: "Secret Arsenal: The hunt for germs of war" (February 26, 1998); "Defector describes Iraq's atom bomb push" (August 15, 1998); "Iraqi tells of renovations at sites for chemical and nuclear arms" (December 20, 2001); "Defectors bolster US case against Iraq, officials say" (January 24, 2003).
In May, an internal NYT email written by Miller found its way to the Washington Post's media columnist. In the message, Miller casually revealed her source for many of these stories: Ahmed Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile leader (and convicted embezzler) who for over a decade had been lobbying Washington to support the overthrow of Hussein's regime.
"I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years", Miller wrote. "He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."
Chalabi, with his network of defectors and exiles, is known in Washington foreign-policy circles as a primary source for many of the weapons allegations that career CIA analysts greeted with skepticism, but that Pentagon hawks promoted eagerly.
In short, the longstanding "consensus" in official circles that Iraq must have been harbouring illegal arms has always had somewhat murky origins.
Behind the thundering allegations issued at heavily publicised official press conferences, a careful observer might have noticed quiet signs of dissent — the "senior intelligence analyst" who anonymously told the Washington Post four days before the war started that one reason UN inspectors didn't find any weapons stockpiles "is because there may not be much of a stockpile".
Or Rolf Ekeus, the former head of UNSCOM, who told a Harvard gathering three years ago that "we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's [WMD] capabilities fundamentally".
Or, for that matter, UNSCOM alum Scott Ritter, whose publicly aired doubts about the alleged weapons led a raft of scornful newspaper profiles to scoff that he must be some kind of crank.
Weeks before the war began, the transcript of [high-ranking Iraqi defector] Hussein Kamel's 1995 private briefing to UN inspectors was leaked and posted to the internet (Newsweek, March 3). The interview revealed a crucial fact that the Clinton and Bush administrations, which both promoted the defector's story as evidence of an ongoing Iraqi WMD threat, had long neglected to mention: Kamel told the inspectors that all the weapons had been destroyed. Coming from the head of Iraq's secret weapons industries, a source the Pentagon, CIA and UN had all praised for his intelligence value, the revelation should have been front-page news. Instead, it was barely covered.
[Abridged from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, <http://www.fair.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 20, 2003.
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